


just like the rain

by luminaryestuary



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: And a little fluff, Diane's Perspective, Divorce, F/M, Post-Divorce, angst angst angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:26:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminaryestuary/pseuds/luminaryestuary
Summary: She orders another beer, and another, and another.This is Jim’s way of denying reality, and Diane understands why he likes it so much - why he stays out, tipped over the edge of a bottle, slowly becoming a little bit more of a stranger each time he stumbles through the door of their home.Diane's perspective after Sara's death, during the end of her marriage and beyond.One-shot. Pre-Season 1 through Post-Season 2.





	just like the rain

**Author's Note:**

> i. This is inspired by the Cary Brothers cover of "If You Were Here" by the Thompson Twins. It's a much more melancholy and emotional version of the song. When I heard it I thought it perfectly applied to Hopper and Diane, and the end of their marriage after Sara's death.  
> ii. Do yourself a favor and listen to it if you're reading this. It's really lovely.

 

_and if you were here  
i could deceive you_

 

Grief is a strange and terrible thing.

It wraps itself around her heart like a choking vine, squeezing, always squeezing. The presence of it is metallic, sharp and overwhelming; some mornings she wakes up and remembers that Sara is gone, and the will to get out of bed vanishes.

Diane has lost loved ones before, but nothing could have ever prepared her to bury her only child.

There are so many days where her tears stain the pillowcase, where the endless hole in heart claws itself wider, and trying to contain the raw fringes of it is a monumental effort.

Jim doesn’t react this way, and at first she doesn’t notice, far too lost in her own suffering to really see it. When she finally does notice, about three months have passed.

His behavior confuses her.

He holds her at night when she cries, but doesn’t shed a tear himself. He hadn’t even cried at the funeral; he’d stood next to her in the cemetery, stony-faced, his blue eyes dull and glazed over.

He wakes up in the morning and goes to his job with no difficulty; he’s a detective for the New York City Police Department, and he works long hours. When he comes home, he kisses her, but it feels detached.

Sometimes she catches him staring at her, but his features are always neutral, mask-like, as if intentionally arranged that way. There is no warmth behind his eyes, and maybe she should feel some kind of way about it, but there’s no room for him in her sorrow.

She acutely feels the distance between them after awhile, idly touches the jagged edges until something begins to fester inside her.

The confusion slowly evolves over days and weeks, constantly changing shape.

One day she sees his emotionless face after he walks through the door, and for some reason it makes her angry – so, so angry.

They begin to fight. It’s over little things at first – a minor delay in returning home after his shift is over; the laundry not being folded just so; leaving the toilet seat up on occasion.

Soon the ugliness of her resentment begins to crawl into her words, harsh and venomous, and one evening she finally spits it in his face.

“You act like you don’t even care!” Her voice is ragged and cracked. “Our daughter is dead in the ground and you act like nothing ever happened!”

Something becomes dangerously unmoored in him, and then there is undiluted fury bubbling between the crevices of that carefully constructed mask. It burns in his eyes and his face and turns him into someone she’s never seen before. He moves toward her suddenly, his lips pulled back over his clenched teeth.

She shrinks away from him, and he stops in his tracks.

He just… stops, breathing heavily, his pupils wide, almost blacking out the blue.

He turns from her and leaves, grabs his jacket and slams the door on his way out.

She sinks to the floor in their townhouse, sobbing.

He doesn’t come home that night.

 

* * *

 

_and if you were here  
you would believe_

 

“I can’t do this anymore,” she says, trailing her finger through the condensation on her pint glass. She’s sitting in a dive bar, a crappy little place full of cigarette smoke and alcoholics.

“Hmm.” Bill, one of Jim’s friends from the station, is across the small table from her. He thoughtfully takes a sip of beer. “It’s temporary, Diane. He’s just having a hard time.”

Diane sighs. “I don’t think it’s temporary.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. He’s not the same. He doesn’t look at me the same way.” She tries to disguise the pain in her voice. The distance between her and Jim feels miles wide now, a tectonic rift that continues to pull apart.

“He’d be crazy not to,” Bill muses, giving her a pointed look.

Diane presses her lips together and stares back at him. He’s a handsome man; blue eyes, dark brown hair sprinkled with silver, and a strong jaw. He’s more than a few years older than her, sure, but still plenty attractive.

She’s lonely, grieving for her daughter and her marriage, and aching for something that she knows she shouldn’t want… but Jim hasn’t touched her since their blowout fight in the kitchen two months ago.

She orders another beer, and another, and another.

This is Jim’s way of denying reality, and Diane understands why he likes it so much - why he stays out, tipped over the edge of a bottle, slowly becoming a little bit more of a stranger each time he stumbles through the door of their home.

She fucks Bill in the back seat of his car that night, dulling the sharpness of her grief as her orgasm crashes over her.

He touches her in the ways that Jim used to and more, and she thinks that maybe she should feel guilty, but she doesn’t.

 

* * *

 

 _but would you suspect_  
_my emotion wandering, yeah_  
_do not want a part of this anymore_

 

Jim doesn’t fight her on the divorce.

Hell, he’s barely present enough to fight his way through the days and weeks that pass.

They sell the townhouse, pack up and move everything out without even seeing each other.

Diane refuses to see him, mostly because he’s spiraling down so hard that she doesn’t want to watch him self-destruct. Her father had done that to himself years ago, and she’ll be damned if she has to see it happen again.

Bill tells her that Jim can’t even be bothered to show up to work sober most days; their superiors ignore it, but only because they have far more pressing matters to attend to, like the rising crime rates in many areas of the city.

When the divorce finalizes, she breathes a sigh of relief.

She visits Sara’s grave twice every month, always leaving flowers and trimming back the weeds a bit. It’s hard to believe that just over a year has passed at this point; the boundless grief is still there, always, but it's become somewhat easier to carry with her, now.

There’s never any indication that Jim comes to see Sara. Maybe she should be angry, but instead she just feels pity for him – this sad, broken man who has become totally foreign to her.

One day, Bill tells her that Jim has resigned from the NYPD; that he’s heading back to his hometown in Indiana.

After a few years, she begins to forget that she was ever married to Jim Hopper.

It feels like another life.

 

* * *

  **  
**

_The rainwater drips  
through a crack in the ceiling_

 

Diane finds out that she’s pregnant on a Tuesday morning. She calls Bill at work and he actually leaves the station to come home, excitedly sweeping her into his arms and kissing her over and over.

The pregnancy taps into a deep well of emotions inside her, opening a thousand scars that she thought had healed.

There are days when she cries tears of joy, because she’s been given another chance.

Then there are days where she has to lock herself in the bathroom at her office to regain her composure, simply because she’d felt the baby kick.

Diane still visits Sara twice a month, even when her belly is a bit too cumbersome to bend over properly. She performs her regular routines of trimming back grass and laying a bouquet of wildflowers beneath the engraved name.

She holds her breath before she approaches the headstone, waiting to see if there are flowers from Jim.

There never are.

Eventually, she doesn’t hold her breath anymore.

Diane gives birth on a Saturday, in the late hours of the night. Bill is holding her hand when their son enters the world – squalling indignantly, face scrunched up and red.

He quiets as soon as he’s laid on her chest, and he opens his blue eyes and looks at her. Her heart aches as she touches the fine, blonde hair on his tiny head, and for a vanishing moment, she finds herself wishing for Jim to be there, wishing for this child to be _their_ second chance.

Bill kisses her sweaty forehead, and she smiles at him; that thought disappears in an instant.

They name him David.

 

* * *

 

_and i'll have to spend  
my time on repair_

 

It’s late afternoon, and Diane is getting ready to lay David down for a nap when the phone rings.

She doesn’t think anything of it. “Hello?”

“Hey.”

She nearly drops the cordless handset when she hears his voice. “Jim?”

“Yeah.”

She sighs. “Why are you calling me here? I told you not to call me.” There’s a certain tightness in her chest that she hadn’t expected, but she tries to ignore it.

“I know, I know, I know. I just wanted to… I just wanted to hear your voice and uh, I just wanted to say that, um…” He trails off, breathes deeply a few times. “Even after everything that happened, I don’t… I don’t regret any of it. And those seven years, they were everything to me.”

“Have you been drinking?” She regrets the words as they leave her lips; they come out harsher than she wants them to.

“No,” he replies, a bit too drawn out to be sober. “No.”

David chooses that moment to start crying, and her blood turns to ice in her veins at the sound, knowing that Jim can probably hear it.

Diane reaches out and smooths a hand over David’s hair. “Shh honey, hey. Hey, it’s okay. Shh. It’s okay.”

He keeps fussing, kicking his feet, and she hears another deep breath over the line.

“You know what, actually, I have been drinking. I’m sorry.”

Her heart aches at his admission, all those terrible nights coming back to her in an instant. “Jim, I can’t…”

“Just take care of yourself, okay?” There is a different emotion coming through his voice now. “Say hi to Bill for me.”

She winces at the thinly veiled sadness in his voice. “Are you sure—”

The line clicks before she can finish, and the dial tone begins to drone in her ear.

She pulls the handset away from her ear and stares at it. Something is gnawing at her, telling her that there is something seriously wrong, and before she can stop herself, she’s dialing him back.

The phone rings once, twice, then the fuzzy disconnect tone begins to play.

_We’re sorry, the number you are trying to reach—_

She slams the handset down.

David begins to cry in earnest, so she turns her attention to him, her voice as soothing as it can be while her shoulders tremble.

She spends the rest of the afternoon trying to forget that Jim called.

 

* * *

 

_but just like the rain  
i'll be always falling, yeah_

 

It’s a gray, overcast Sunday morning.

Autumn has finally arrived, the breeze carrying the edge of a bitter chill, hinting at the winter to come.

Diane walks through the cemetery with her pruning shears in her purse, a bouquet of flowers tucked into the crook of her elbow. She follows the usual path to Sara’s grave, enjoying the quiet solitude.

As soon as she rounds the gate that leads to the newer section of the cemetery, she stops.

There is a tall man standing near Sara’s headstone, his chin to his chest and his hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. She knows that it’s Jim, even from this distance.

He’s a very long way from Indiana.

She steps back behind a mausoleum, peeking around the corner of it.

He hasn’t noticed her presence.

Diane thinks about approaching him, and her heart pounds, her nerves jangling around in her chest. She has no way of knowing how he’ll react to her, or vice versa. There are so many long years lodged between them, their estrangement more solid than ever.

Before she can act, however, she sees him look up.

A petite woman is walking toward him, her arms wrapped around herself as a strong breeze rustles through the bare trees. She has messy reddish-brown hair, and despite her sharp cheekbones, her expression is soft. The woman touches Jim’s arm, and he leans down to kiss her, drawing her into his embrace.

Diane has to look away for a moment; something about watching them feels forbidden, like she’s observing something she was never meant to see.

They stand there, Jim and this woman, for several long minutes.

Jim touches the headstone briefly, and then they leave together.

Diane waits until they’re well out of sight before she approaches Sara’s grave.

A bouquet of white roses has been carefully placed beneath her name.

She stares at it for a long time, until a few stray raindrops spur her to begin her usual routine.

When she’s done, she lays her flowers next to the roses, traces her fingers over the engraved letters one at a time.

It starts to pour as Diane walks back to her car. Normally she’d hurry, covering her head with her jacket, but today the cold water soaks through her hair.

She lets herself really feel the grief that she's carried for all these years.

It's not so endless, anymore.

_only to rise and fall again_

 


End file.
